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Brussels Sprouts, Sautés
Pick, wash and boil one quart of Brussels Sprouts; drain carefully, put them in a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of butter, toss over a quick fire for about eight minutes, then add one tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper; serve very hot.
Sprouts may also be used, plain boiled, as a garnish for braised meats.
A straightforward two-stage method: boil, then finish in butter. The only real trap is doing both stages at full length, which leaves you with grey mush.
- A quart of sproutsThe recipe measures by volume rather than weight, as many of the period do. One quart of trimmed sprouts is roughly 1 lb, or about 4 cups — enough for four as a side dish.
- The boiling time the recipe omitsNo boiling time is given at all. Boil only until a knife meets slight resistance at the core, about 5-7 minutes for medium sprouts, since they still have eight minutes of pan time ahead.
- Drain and dry, not just drain"Drain carefully" is the hinge. Wet sprouts steam in the butter instead of browning, and the finished dish turns watery once the vinegar goes in. Spread them on a towel for a minute before they meet the pan.
- A quick fireHigh heat on a modern burner, in a wide skillet rather than a saucepan so the sprouts sit in one layer. Eight minutes of tossing over that heat is meant to colour the outsides; if they are already fully soft from boiling, cut it to three or four.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out — typically a white wine vinegar steeped with tarragon, sharper and more aromatic than plain. White wine vinegar with a pinch of dried tarragon is a reasonable stand-in. Add it off the heat so it does not simply evaporate.
- Picking"Pick" means trimming the stem end and stripping loose outer leaves, not sorting through a garden crop. Halving larger sprouts through the root gives more surface for the butter, though the original leaves them whole.
- Seasoning"A palatable seasoning" is a period way of saying salt to taste. Salt the boiling water generously as well; unsalted sprouts finished in butter taste flat no matter how much you add at the end.
Brussels sprouts have been associated with the region around Brussels since at least the eighteenth century, and reached English and American markets as a late-autumn and winter vegetable — which is why they sit among the cold-weather entries in books of this kind. The sauté treatment here is French kitchen practice applied to a homely vegetable: parboil to tenderness, then finish quickly in fat with an acid and a herb, a formula that turns up in period cookbooks for green beans, cauliflower and potatoes alike. Tarragon vinegar is often said to have been a common pantry item in American kitchens of the era, sometimes made at home by steeping fresh tarragon in vinegar through the summer, and its appearance might be read as suggesting a cook working in the French idiom rather than the plain-boiled English one. The closing note about using sprouts as a garnish for braised meats reflects the period's habit of treating vegetables as part of the platter's composition rather than as a separate dish.